


Certain Half-Deserted Streets

by neednot



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, Cancer Arc, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-20
Updated: 2016-11-20
Packaged: 2018-08-31 23:55:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8598871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neednot/pseuds/neednot
Summary: If she dies, what is left behind of her? Research and logic and a hole in Fox Mulder’s heart, a mother with two dead daughters.





	

**I.**

_LET us go then, you and I,_  
_When the evening is spread out against the sky  
_ _Like a patient etherized upon a table._

 

She is dying. 

Dying, died, dead. _Sterben, gestorben_ … 

She can’t remember the word for dead.

Conjugation was never her strong suit. 

 

She doesn’t want to admit it to herself but the truth is staring her in the face in the form of an X-ray, a mass, a cancer. 

Her instinct is to call him. Before anyone else, it’s to call him.

She doesn’t think about what that means for both of them. What it will mean if she dies. What it will mean for him.

The look on his face when she tells him, the godawful certainty he has that they can fix this, is almost too much to bear.

She’s never been one to indulge in his quite frankly childish fantasies, but she indulges him in this one. 

She knows she can’t break his heart just yet. 

 

He takes her home, not speaking on the car ride. 

She doesn’t invite him in with her. She wants to be alone, wants the quiet emptiness of her own apartment. She knows she will be surrounded by family and by doctors and nurses and him within the coming months, and she wants to cherish the fleeting solitude. 

That night she coughs up blood, and she wishes desperately he were there to wrap his arms around her and comfort her.

But he isn’t. She’s alone.

 

**II.**

 

_Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,_  
_The muttering retreats_  
_Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels  
_ _And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:_

Cancer progresses in stages, and so too does her grief. At first she doesn’t know why she’s grieving, and then she thinks of the missed opportunities she will have if she dies, or her mother looks at her with that awful, pitying look, and she understands. 

If she dies, what is left behind of her? Research and logic and a hole in Fox Mulder’s heart, a mother with two dead daughters.

She wants to leave behind more than that. If she’s going to die, she decides, she wants some part of her to keep on living. She wants a child, wants one before her body begins betraying her. 

She approaches him with it one evening. He’s been staying at her place more and more, though they haven’t talked about it. She wants to talk about it but she’s afraid if they do, he’ll stop coming around. If they acknowledge it then something has to change between them and she doesn’t think she’s ready for that to happen just yet. 

But time is fleeting, and she doesn’t know how much she has left. 

She is the only one left.

“I don’t want to die,” she says to him. The words fall out of her mouth without much thought.

His head snaps up. “You aren’t dying.” 

“Mulder, I am,” she says stubbornly. “There’s a chance…” 

He shakes his head. “You’re fine right now. I’m not talking statistics with you, probability. You aren’t made of numbers, Scully.” 

She swallows down her fear, nods. It’s what she expected him to say.

But broaching the topic of a child, a child that, in all possibility, she wants with him…

She doesn’t know what to expect with that. Doesn’t know what to expect from him. 

She swallows it down.

 

**III.**

_Streets that follow like a tedious argument_  
Of insidious intent  
To lead you to an overwhelming question …  
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"  
Let us go and make our visit.

 

He thinks of all their time together, all the missed opportunities of cheap motels, chances he had to kiss her he didn’t take. 

It’s gotten worse, lately. It’s been a week since she admitted to him her fear of dying and he’s watched her come closer to realizing that fear. Watched the protruding of her collarbone, her normally sharp face drawn even more gaunt. 

She’s eating less, her clothing hanging off her small frame where it was normally as sharply tailored as possible. Even Skinner has noticed, but as long as she’s working, he won’t force her to stop.

“She needs this, Mulder,” Skinner said one evening after Scully had left, standing awkwardly in the basement doorway like he didn’t know how to belong there. 

Mulder had brushed past him, refusing to hear it, and Skinner had clapped him awkwardly on the shoulder as he went, the weight of his hand too much. 

 

“I want a child.” 

He thinks he hasn’t heard her right. He looks up at her small form curled up in an armchair, body wrapped in the robe from the hospital so large it nearly swallows her. 

“What?” 

“I want a child,” she says. It’s the most stubborn she’s sounded in weeks, the most like her old self. 

He can’t think. “Why?” is the only thing out of his mouth. 

“Because,” she says. She runs her fingers over the grooves in the corduroy armchair, the movement hypnotizing. “I want to leave something behind when I die. Some piece of me.” 

The _when I die_ is what hits him. 

“You’re not dying.” 

“Mulder, stop it,” she says, and she looks up and fixes him with an icy stare. “I am going to die. This cancer, it’s…” 

He stands, turns his back to her, resists covering his ears like a child. He hears her shift and get out of the chair, feels the warmth of her palms against his back hears her breathing. 

“This cancer is going to invade my brain, and it is going to kill me. I don’t know how many months I have left,” she says. 

He turns. “You can’t talk like that. Jesus, Scully.” 

Her laugh is dry and brittle. “I know you want me,” she says, taking his hands. “And I… I want a child, Mulder, and I want one with you—”

She presses against him, then stumbles, falling against his chest. His arms encircle her without thinking. “Look at you,” he says. “You’re too weak to stand, what makes you think you can bear a child?” 

He doesn’t have to push her away. She pulls away at his words, frown creasing her forehead.

“Because I’m stubborn,” she says quietly. “Because I will. I am not dying without leaving something good behind in this world.” 

She stands on tiptoe to kiss him, misses his mouth, and her lips press against his cheek. 

“You haven’t shaved,” she murmurs, taking her hand and tracing it down his jawline. 

“Too worried,” he says, and kisses her on the forehead. She groans in what he thinks (assumes, knows) is frustration. 

“Kiss me,” she says. Words he’s been waiting to hear from Dana Scully’s mouth for years. 

But not like this.

“This isn’t right,” he says, looking down at her. “Think about this, it isn’t right.” 

She ignores him, then kisses him desperately, wraps her slender hands around his forearms, tugs him down to her. Crushes her mouth against his. He’s dreamed about this for ages, fantasized about it late at night. 

But this is wrong. Feels wrong. 

“I can’t,” he says, pulling back from her. 

“I need you to. I need you to fuck me like I’m not broken, like I’m not dying,” she says. “ _Please_ , Mulder.” 

“I can’t,” he says again, and turns and heads to the spare bedroom and shuts the door.

 

Later that night she crawls into bed beside him, kisses him.“I’m sorry,” she whispers, her thin form against his back, her cheek pressing in between his shoulder blades.. She trails kisses down his neck and tangles her cold feet in his as he turns to face her. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…” she says with each kiss, until she doesn’t need to say it, until he’s kissing her back with the same fervor, until he’s pinning her down to the bed and sliding his hands under her (his borrowed) T-shirt.

It’s quick and rough, the sex. Everything unsaid between them causing the friction, and she clutches at his T-shirt and wraps her legs around him when she comes. 

She excuses herself to the bathroom, after, and he pretends not to notice the blood on the edge of his T-shirt from where she buried her face into the crook of his neck. 

 

**IV.**

_For I have known them all already, known them all:_  
_Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,_  
_I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;_  
_I know the voices dying with a dying fall_  
_Beneath the music from a farther room.  
_ _So how should I presume?_

 

Her hair is thinning. She’s nauseous, and he has to help her out of the car. 

This is killing her. Killing him. 

She doesn’t have the strength to insist she’s fine anymore. 

He doesn’t tell her he has her ova stashed away. Doesn’t tell her she can’t have children. She’ll figure it out in her own time if she… if she lives, and he doesn’t want to be the one to let her know.

He keeps that terrible secret to himself. 

What’s more terrible is he knows if he tells her that will be the end of her crawling into bed with him, of nights of quiet, frantic sex. He’s using her, he knows. But then she’s using him, too, using him for a child she thinks she will have the strength to carry. 

If they use each other up what will be left? 

More and more now he tries not to think about her dying, more and more the images come to him, fast and unbidden and unwanted. Her funeral. Her mother, her brothers, a Catholic funeral with too much ceremony and not enough of _her._

If she dies, what does she leave behind? A broken family and a broken man too scared to tell her he loves her, too scared to tell her the truth. 

He whispers “I love you” into her hair at night when she’s sleeping and doesn’t think she can hear him. 

When she dies it’s going to break him.

 

**V.**

_And I have known the eyes already, known them all—_  
_The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,_  
_And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,_  
_When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,_  
_Then how should I begin_  
_To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?  
_ _And how should I presume?_

 

She knows. 

She heard him talking on the phone to someone, probably Langley, Byers, one of them. Maybe even Skinner, maybe even her mother. He’s grown closer with everyone she knows, these days, like he’ll be able to hold onto her when she’s gone through his interactions with them. 

“Procedure… abduction… infertile…”

The words ricochet through her head like a bullet, like promises half-said and remembered. She thinks, then, maybe she is glad to die so she doesn’t have to live through the disappointment of everyone’s expectations for her as a woman. 

She closes her eyes. Maybe if she tries hard enough now she’ll just slip away into oblivion along with all the things everyone else wanted her to be. 

But everyone else wants her to live.

She doesn’t think that’s what she wants anymore. 

Living, lived, will live.

_Leben, lebt…_

Conjugation was never her strong suit.


End file.
